Qu’est-ce que la démocratie ? - définition, conditions et évolution

Thèmes abordés

Démocratie, souveraineté du peuple, Etat de Droit, vidéocratie, liberté, égalité

Résumé du document

Le changement fondamental pour la démocratie s'est produit à la fin du Xxe siècle lorsque l'URSS a disparu : il y a eu passage d'un régime totalitaire à un régime hybride avec le présidentialisme autoritaire du couple Poutine-Medvedev. En 1985, 40 de la population mondiale vivait sous un régime démocratique. En 2010, 60 de la population vit sous un régime démocratique.
Qu'est-ce que la démocratie ? c'est une question qui a l'air simple alors que c'est une question compliquée.

Extraits

[...] This collaboration materializes with the signing of cooperation treaty : the Rome-Berlin Axis is created and Mussolini along with Hitler sends troops to Spain to support Franco and signs the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937. On May the cooperation between Italy and Germany is completed with the signing of the Pact of Steel : it is an open declaration of continous trust and collaboration between Italy and Germany in which they promised a mutual military assistance if one of them is involved in a conflict with one or several other nations. [...]

[...] Murders of union activists, repression during demonstrations, humiliations of socialist leaders make the social unrest decrease. - In 1921, the Socialist party disintregrates whereas the National Fascist Party, created on November counts more than 300.000 members. Knowing this favorable context, the NFP decides to carry out the March on Rome on October The King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing a civil war, refuses to call for the army, although able to break the March : it marks the suicide of the democracy. [...]

[...] Moreover people were arrested and found innoncent, a procedure quite inconceivable under conditions of Nazi or Bolshevik terror. - Still in comparison with the national-socialism and stalinist communism, racist themes are strongly minoritarian in the fascist discourse although some were lately included particularly in the imitation of nazism. Antisemitism is the basis of the Nazi doctrine and, though not official, is present in the communism of Stalin who liquidated jewish organizations and decimated the jewish population during the Great Purge but is absent from Italian fascism up to 1938. [...]

[...] A partial totalitarianism peculiar to Italy 1. Fascism: an Italian reality - Although the term has been largely used to refer to political movements that present some similarities with the Italian one, fascism is above all an italian reality. The very term of fascism is derived from the Latin fasces which consisted in a bundle of rods tied around an axe and which was an Ancient Roman symbol of the authority. Fascism remains specifically Italian because it possesses a specifically national component that we cannot find in national-socialism (which appeared in Germany and Austria) and in stalinist communism (because of the concept of proletarian internationalism) : fascism is a radical form of nationalism which main purpose is to unify the nation. [...]

[...] The military failures and the heavy losses of Italy during World War Two finish breaking the consensus. Mussolini is arrested in July 1943 and the armistice is signed in September 1943. He is finally captured and executed by communist partisans on April Conclusion : Italian fascism was more than a dictatorship but yet, less than a totalitarianism. Although we cannot consider it as a regime which would imply a certain passivity, Italian fascism can be seen as a partial, an incomplete or a failed totalitarianism that attempted to transform itself into an integral totalitarianism but didn't manage to build a simplistic ideology served by mass terror, to control all the aspects of the society and to create a new man. [...]